Adam Baranello's Vampire Film 'Night' Debuts Saturday in Southampton

When Hampton Bays artist Adam Baranello set out to make his seventh feature film, Night, premiering this Saturday at Southampton Cultural Center (SCC), he had reservations about tackling the vampire genre, but he found its familiarity offered some unexpected advantages.

“I was scared to do a vampire film because I didn’t want it to look really campy and cheesy. Like, even though I would love to watch that, I don’t want to make that,” Baranello, a painter, dancer and musician, says, explaining his initial struggles with the idea. In the end, however, he found himself really embracing the gothic imagery and enjoying being able to trust the audience to understand what wasn’t being shown on the screen. “We all know the tropes, like we all know what happens. So, if you just show flashes of the tropes, like you see the teeth, you see blood, but you don’t have to see this huge, choreographed death, I could probably pull it off where it looks kind of cool and artsy and not campy and really bad,” he adds.

“In regards to a film, give people credit. The people know what they’re watching. Everybody knows vampire stuff, right? So you don’t have to redo that part of it,” Baranello continues. “I liked working in the parameters of that, because I like the tropes of a vampire world, but it’s still an art film about relationships and love and connection, which is what most of the films are that I make. But it was really cool to do it through a vampire kind of perspective, because you can do the darker cemeteries and grays, the statues, all these gothic, Catholic kind of things…”

Night, which debuts as part of Baranello’s second Off Hampton Film Festival at SCC this Saturday, January 18 at 7 p.m., examines the idea of love and relationships between several vampires and a human couple, juxtaposing how things are different when the brevity of a normal lifespan is removed from the equation. Instead of couples needing to be together at all times, the filmmaker says his immortal vampires realize they have hundreds, if not thousands, of years to be together. Freed from the burden of constant companionship, the undead simply check in with their beloved each night with a phone call before sunrise.

“So the word ‘night’ is vampires come out at night, which is what people will probably think, like nighttime. But also the double entendre of ‘night,’ as in ‘good night,’ like just saying, ‘Good night, I love you,’ to the person,” Baranello says.

Interestingly, Baranello makes his films like he creates his paintings, starting with a general idea or premise and then building layers as he goes. Sometimes, something that occurred in one shoot would lead him to film something later to expand upon that thing. At one point, for example, a banana ended up in a shot and looked oddly out of place, but Baranello used the symbol a couple more times in the film, making it appear as a very deliberate Easter egg, and the movie is better, and a bit more nuanced, because of it.

He also notes that the phone call scenes were filmed with the different people on each end of the phone at different times and places, but they somehow feel seamless and a real chemistry unfolds between actors Mya Davis of Sag Harbor and Alex Propson of Bravo reality series Below Deck Sailing Yacht, despite them not actually talking to each other in real time. It’s quite a trick.

Like all Baranello’s films, Night is filled with his “Grunge Pop” artwork, fashion designs, music and dance numbers, choreographed with his wife Gail Baranello, who plays half of the human couple with actor Joe Carson. (Jaime Thompson also choreographed one dance.)

Throughout the film, musician David J. Moriarty, who plays one of the vampires (with Tara Ryze as his mate), works on a song that is finally finished as Night concludes. The song, “Fade,” is an original collaboration between Baranello and Moriarty, and it incorporates a human heartbeat, recorded in one of the movie’s bloodier scenes. It’s also one of the main threads that carries through the film.

“There’s no epic pinnacle or whatever, but the fact that he’s working on the song and then he gets the heartbeat from a sample of a victim and puts it in the song is, to me, a funny way to move the story along where it has this closure or resolution,” he adds.

Baranello and cast members from Night, including his wife Gail, will attend Saturday’s premiere and hold a talkback with the audience after the film screens.

Learn more about Adam Baranello and his work at ajbartspace.com and @adambaranello via Instagram. For more info about the Night premiere, visit scc-arts.org.